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Tag: academic journals

Proposal for A World Congress on Referencing Styles

I have been busy over the last few days correcting proofs for two forthcoming articles. One of the journals accepts neither footnotes nor endnotes so I had to find place in the text for the >20 footnotes I had. As usual, most of these footnotes result directly from the review process so getting rid of them is not an option even if many are of marginal significance. The second journal accepts only footnotes – no in-text referencing at all – so I had to rework all the referencing into footnotes. Both journals demanded that I provide missing places of publication for books and missing page numbers for articles. Ah, the joys of academic work! But seriously… How is it possible that a researcher working in the XXI century still has to spend his/her time changing commas into semicolons and abbreviating author names to conform to the style of a particular journal? I just don’t get it. I am all for referencing and beautifully-formatted bibliographies but can’t we all agree on one single style? Does it really matter if the years of a publication are put in brackets or not? Who cares if the first name of the author follows the family name or the other way round? Do we really need to know the place of publication of a book? Where do you actually look for this information? Is it Thousand Oaks, London, or New Delhi? All three appear on the back of a random SAGE book I picked from the shelf……

The present and the future of academic publishing

Academic publishing remains one of the most mysterious industries to me even after being caught in its web for a while. I have found no better presentation of the idiocy of the whole system than this video: more here Unfortunately, recent development (at least in social science journals) do not make me very hopeful about the future. Economic journal are abandoning double-blind review (see for example here) and Political Analysis, which prides itself to be the number one political science journal, recently announced that it will do the same (there does not seem to be an official announcement yet on the site of the journal). According to the new policy, the identity of authors would be revealed to the reviewers (who remain anonymous). The main argument for doing so is that in many cases the reviewers can guess the authors anyways. It is puzzling that economists and analytical political scientists of all people would fall for this argument – even if many reviewers can guess/google the identity of the authors, double-blind review is still a Pareto improvement over single-blind review: while it may not work in all cases, it doesn’t hurt in any. I would rather encourage more accountability on the side of the reviewers. Anonymous or not, manuscript reviews should be public documents. Why not attach them to the digital copies of the articles when published (or even better, when rejected)? I can see no harm in making the reviews publicly available by default.  Instead, after serving as a reviewer…